This has both clever palette choices and clever uses for sprites and backgrounds.

I don't really like the white in the character. Too much contrast with the somewhat dark purple and blue. I'm thinking a light blue would work better. I don't think you need that grey, so you can replace it with the dark red color you're using.

It doesn't look too far off from what has been done on NES. The explosions aren't any bigger than those in the NES game Thwaite; they just look more like popcorn. And both the floor and the craft above it can be drawn as background. With CHR ROM banking, there isn't much of a 256 tile limit.

Here's a picture of how it originally looked (well, not exactly, but you get the idea.): (I hate how vibrant the NES's color palette is. I couldn't find a brown that didn't look straight up red, so I just used grey for the plane. The same situation happened with the train):

Do a Kid Niki and make that take a sprite while the ship is a BG object that moves around. Of course, the Tank is too big to be used as a sprite, so only use around 16 pixels or so.

Alternatively, just remove the tank entirely and just walk around on the ground to shoot the boss. I find it amazing what sorts of workarounds and creative liberties contract developers had to come up with when it came to ports.

Alternatively, just remove the tank entirely and just walk around on the ground to shoot the boss.

If you mean the train, (the thing the player is standing on) I'm not sure how that would work. The whole level is fought on the train and you go to the front of it, which you are seeing there. I know this really isn't practical and that the developers would never do something like this, but could you actually have it to where the boss and the train are both BGs? You'd have tiles of the train moving around and the scrolling counter acting it so it looks like the boss is flying around. (The boss would use more than one palette, unlike the train.) I don't even know how this would work without making a million different tiles and I imagine processing it all would be a nightmare... Because of how the NES uses tiles, would it actually be possible to have hardware in the cart that renders the tiles of the train moving? I guess you could do this with CHR ram and some sort of enhancement chip?

Arnold has been rendered as a background image, while everything else, including the mid-air platforms, are sprites that scroll. So what you could do is have the floor and tank be the lower layer, and the flying machine to be the upper layer. That means the machine can't fly below the tank and touch the floor, limiting its area of movement. You could move it horizontally, though, and I'm pretty sure you could make the machine fly 'under' the tank, by performing some sort of overlapping trick. So I'd say you should have the tank take up most of the horizontal space, since if the machine were to go under the "blank area", it might disappear? I actually wonder.

It wasn't uncommon for NES ports of arcade games to either rework some aspects (the mazes in the Contra bases for example) or to cut stages out entirely.

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